Translation Day 8: don’t need a sail to sail

Today is Day 8 of this celebration of checking Luke in the Onnele translations last month.

When checking Luke 8:26, right away it was obvious that we didn’t express the meaning of ‘sailed’ as in “So they sailed over to the region of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee.” (NET)

But how do you translate an idea that comes from a boating culture for a language group that lives in the foothills of the mountains? They are separated from the coast by a few miles of jungle, sago swamps, and their traditional enemies.

Since the cloth sails of the boat are not in focus in this verse, I wasn’t so concerned with making sure the mechanics of sailing are referred to in this verse. My main concern is that the translation is clear that they went across to the other side of the lake in a boat and not by walking around the lake along the shore. Here is the Wolwale Onnele translation with literal English back translation…

They went opposite of big lake, they went came to part ground of Gerasenes. This part ground it lies opposite of district Galilee.

So when I pointed out to the Onnele translators that we didn’t have anything in this verse about sailing, they laughed and said, “How are we bush people going to say anything about boats. We could use our word for tying logs together on the river to make little rafts for sending garden food down to our village, but that’s not what Jesus and the disciples did.”

I explained that it didn’t matter so much about referring to ‘sailing’ or to any boat, but how would Onnele speakers know when they read this that they didn’t walk around the lake to the other side?

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” they said. And then they explained to me that the two verb phrases they used here painri repo “they went opposite” and painri plele pike plola e nu Gerasa “they went came to part ground of Gerasenes” make it clear that they went across the lake. They would have used other words for go if the action involved walking or going around the lake. And besides, they asked me, “Isn’t it clear from vv. 22-25 that they’re still in the boat?”

So context really helps here in this verse where the Onnele speakers don’t have a word for ‘sailing’. We Bible teachers constantly press upon our students to pay attention to context. For the Onnele speakers, it seems that context always plays a more important role in distinguishing between potentially ambiguous forms.